Revelation 1:4-8
John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, 6 and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.
7 Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.
8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.
Have you been creeped out, mystified, confused, or just plain scared by the book of Revelation? If so, you may be entitled to compensation in the form of a structured sermon series from someone not looking to control you with fear but give you hope in a hopeless time, just as the original author intended.
So here we go! Revelation was a LETTER. It was written, like all letters, FROM a particular party and TO a particular party… in this case from a particular church leader named John, TO seven particular churches in the Roman province of Asia, which is now the Western coastal region of Turkey. John knew these churches personally. They all knew him. He wasn’t with each of them every week but probably visited them regularly sort of like a bishop would except that in the late first century when this was written, bishops weren’t yet a thing.
This letter was meant to be read out loud, in one go, in worship like a radio drama so the imagery and imagination would take off together leaving the listener with a hope more profound than if John had just sent them a greeting card with words “BE HOPEFUL!” written inside. That is ALL Revelation is. A letter FROM John… TO those particular people in those particular churches, FOR that particular time. Period. NOT ONE BIT OF IT was written with a secret divine woo-woo pen that gave it hidden meaning to be found and revealed thousands of years later. It was not written to us! This was someone else’s mail!
With that said… sometimes it can be both interesting and educational to read someone else’s mail! To me, reading Revelation is like reading an old letter you found in a trunk in the attic that your great grandpa wrote to his sweetheart during the war. If you can resist the temptation to believe that great grandpa was not ACTUALLY writing to the person who would become your great grandma but to YOU, his yet unborn descendant generations away in secret code… if you can resist THAT temptation… then you might be able to read it and learn something about the way they faced adversity and fear. What they did to persevere. How they held onto love even in the midst of horror.
That can also be true of the letter we call Revelation. When we read it we can also learn of a time that was plenty dramatic enough without any of the made up, idiotic nonsense people have piled on it over the years. The original apostles were gone, but the institutional church had not yet grown into being. Back in Israel/Palestine, Jewish revolutionaries had mixed it up once again with the Roman occupiers resulting in the destruction of the Temple and adding to a critically volatile political/religious instability that fully engulfed the empire, including these seven churches that Paul and his followers had planted. It was in that atmosphere of incredible anxiety, volatility, uncertainty, and terrible persecution that these churches were trying to figure out how to be faithful while the world around them was an absolutely fully involved dumpster fire.
And dumpster fire it was! Wars from Europe to Asia. Vesuvius erupting in 79, burying Pompeii and covering the region with panic causing darkness. There was wide spread famine. Christians became easy scapegoats for everything bad that was happening because they were a minority fringe sect that appealed to the lower classes. They were regarded as an unpatriotic group of atheists… they had no gods after all… and they met in secret eating flesh and drinking blood! The fire that burned much of Rome in Nero’s reign was easily blamed on them and even after Nero died, the tyranny didn’t go away. At the same time, Judaism was pushing out those who saw Jesus as the Messiah.
The people of these seven churches did not feel part of the Roman world nor did they feel a part of the Jewish world. They didn’t know who they were or where they fit, or if they fit anywhere at all and they had no idea how their dumpster fire of a world would crash in on them next!
It is to that particular people, in that particular time… a people weary and worn, who staggered into church carrying all the weight of their dumpster fire world with them that John begins his letter with the proclamation of hope we read in today’s lesson: “Look! He IS coming!” The Lord God who is the beginning and the end… the One who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty… he IS coming. God sees. God cares. God is coming! Hang in there folks! THAT was the Pastoral message they needed to hear! No secret extra hidden message required. It was life giving JUST AS IT WAS WRITTEN!
Now, when we read their mail 2000 years later we not only get to hear the same promise that God sees, God cares, and God’s coming, but we know it worked! They hung in there! The storm of empire ran out of rain, as Maya Angelou reminds us all storms do and THAT my friends is something worth taking home from these other people's mail! God sees. God cares. God’s coming. And hey! No secret decoder ring was required to get that message. Amen.
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